A new round of seventh and eighth grade Selectives courses started this week, and the middle school teachers are shaking things up. Seven new offerings are joining perennial favorites – everything from building remote-controlled cars to surviving a zombie apocalypse. Talk about twenty-first century skills . . . ! Take a look at the course descriptions of our new Selectives

Next Wednesday, January 11, the TVS Parents’ Club will host a special screening of “Screenagers: Growing Up in the Digital Age.” This widely-heralded documentary “probes into the vulnerable corners of family life, including the director’s own, and depicts messy struggles over social media, video games, academics and internet addiction. Through surprising insights from authors and brain scientists, solutions emerge on how we

When you have 15 inventive Selectives classes happening simultaneously each week, students and teachers naturally want to take a peek inside other classrooms. Thursday, they got that chance. The middle school transformed into an interactive museum where students and their parents got to watch, listen, taste, build, code, learn, and play with one another. Here are some snapshots from our third semi-annual Selectives Showcase!

Each night at dinner, my family and I share one thing that we feel thankful for and place a stone in our “Thankful Jar.” It’s a tradition that we started because of robust research around the benefits of gratitude. As I described last November, it turns out that thankfulness is really good for you. This year, as we approach Thanksgiving,

“Instead of asking our students what they want to be when they grow up, we should ask them what problem they want to solve.” This advice from Jaime Casap, Google’s Chief Global Education Evangelist, echoes the thoughts of columnist Thomas Friedman, who once wrote: “My generation had it easy. We got to ‘find’ a job. But, more than ever, our kids

A few weeks ago, Dr. Wood, one of our eighth grade Humanities teachers, spoke to middle school students about a community ritual known as The Tolling of the Bells — a time when students gather in the center of our campus and remember the passing of a member of our community. “There is value,” he said, “in remembering.” Next week, the

Each spring in their Skills for Tomorrow class, the fifth grade engages in an exercise in empathy. Following the model of NPR’s StoryCorps project, students pair up and share significant life stories and experiences. Then, with the help of an iPad and a choice of apps, students retell their partner’s story using images, video, and words. As they work on